Second Thoughts

Among the "Friends of Philip"

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualator

"Friends of Philip," formed by Philip Linden himself not long after he returned to Second Life as a kind of "sounding board" to bring him up to date, has morphed into an ungovernable free-for-all like these groups tend to do and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Philip never appears in it and it's not the way to reach him. 

Some of my friends have left it because it is noisy chatter all day long about everything under the sun, like some party line in Penn Yan, NY in 1962 and I know because we used to have one. Or like an AOL chat room which I was never on but I was told was like that.

It's just yammer yammer bitch bitch and grief grief and beg for Lindens all day long. Mainly coders, old and nouveau FIC, and a few big prim-a-donnas have taken it over.

Occasionally, because of its large and sometimes relevant and influential membership, it is worth tuning into at moments when there seems to be actually something to be determined about What is Going On in Second Life, a closed, authoritarian society on the web with a concurrency of about 30,000-40,000 which means that its population might be oh, 300,000 or 500,000 maybe? Like Buffalo.

So in today's episode of the hour we learn that Vir Linden has left the Lab (not be confused with Sir Vix Linden who was let go months ago). Inara had this news yesterdya buried in a SLUG report which is usually eminently forgettable and unreadable but "VIEWER LINDEN VAMOOSES" should have been a Herald headline -- if the Herald still existed.

Curious minds want to know if this Linden who ran open-source projects, i.e. third-party viewers, had any falling out or kerfluffle with Ms. Beq, Goddess of Firestorm, and how this sad news might tie in, if at all (and please don't say "oh, that's how rumours get started" in our closed society where we are fed bullshit and kept like mushrooms in the dark).

Sure, people leave jobs after 20 years, perhaps to "spend time with their family" or perhaps drop acid in an ashram and find their way before repurporsing or whatever it is they do there in Silicon Valley. But suddenly? With no good-bye party? No bear by the campfire to pluck? Nothing? No "hey guys, in fact this is my last office hour *cries*". That suggests some sort of falling out, some sort of real disagreement or crisis.

And we see these weeny little nerdy coder boyz and girlz still thinking they should force PBR down the throats of us rubes. Shame on them! Honestly, I barely have time for these obnoxious tech bros that are defending the Lab at every turn and never have to actually live on sims with their handiworks. PBR has literally MADE SOME OF MY TENANTS LEAVE SL 

But for them it's an artistic/aesthetic/academic/technical problem that is "interesting".

I'm trying to think who "Gray Mainlander" is. "Mainlander" is a fairly recent name you could buy for $40 so with a 2008 rez day, it's somebody else who has been an annoying LL fanboi and tech-botherer possibly from the dawn of time. 

Notice how the tech set try to spin the departure of a Linden dev as "normal" and "natural" although it almost never is when it comes to Linden Lab.  For lots of reasons. Because the long-haul types that have been in the Lab for 20 years are unemployable elsewhere in some regards; it's very specialized and also ridiculed in Silicon Valley although it shouldn't be. As I often say, my son put Second Life and his experience in making a mall and a public quest game called "Sewer Safari" on the Teen Grid, and learning to build and script and run a business, were a valuable lesson in online media work. It was like he was putting "AV Club in High School" on his resume from the old days. And employers who are ordinary people at some company needing media work do NOT laugh, but say "Oh, cool! Oh, is that still going? I've heard of that..." 

These departing Lindens are probably NDA'd out the wazoo so "We'll Never Know" but you can always ask and dig. Yes, Runitai left, leaving his bear near a burning campfire for people to pluck, which felt heavily symbolic. Vir leaving when it's about the viewer -- this should be a huge red flag. Why? Over what disagreement? 

Notice how readily Gray Mainlander wants to shift the problem of PBR and customer losses as a problem of the customer's crappy computer or low-end amateur crappy designers.

No. No. 

PBR is a highly technopolitical plot that was imposed with social Darwinism on an unwilling  population without consent or knowledge, in service to an utterly stupid and unnecessary gamerz vision of "how worlds should look in games so we can have SL compete with gaming."

When you hear this kind of code-cave dreck, you need to shove back hard. In fact, people have been shoving -- shoving out the door of SL back to RL or other worlds like VR whatsis.

BJoyful wins the Polyanna Positive Prize of the month once again for this thread as she has before on the forums and I cite that Twilight Zone episode with good reason! BTW, I have that book as a gift in my quest in SL which you will see as a BBB stamp venue next week.

[14:16] Gray Mainlander: just watching yesterday's tpv meeting and apparently vir linden, one of the main devs of the LL viewer has departed the lab.[14:16] Sunni Mystiere: I wonder why :/
[14:16] Gray Mainlander: they didn
[14:16] Gray Mainlander: they didn't say, rather
[14:16] Ty Bombastic: 🤔
[14:16] Sunni Mystiere: Ahh ... makes sense.
[14:17] Gray Mainlander: he was a fixture for a long time as far as i remember
[14:17] Valencia Skydancer: people quit jobs all the time.
[14:18] Sunni Mystiere: Yes, they do.
[14:18] SarahKB7 Koskinen: Runitai left a couple of weeks ago too
[14:18] Sunni Mystiere: SL just needs all the help it can get :P (said warmly)
[14:18] IceCold Skytower: why are all the main devs of SL leaving
[14:19] SarahKB7 Koskinen: Best not to speculate.
[14:19] IceCold Skytower: meanwhile im now able to make SL look like present day video games with the PBR features
[14:19] Alta Thiemen: SL is over 20. They're getting old :P
[14:19] Gray Mainlander: change in directional focus is my guess , but its just a guess
[14:19] IceCold Skytower: PBR is a great addition
https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aoefh5VPRYVVidJvnipLAqDC8cbl2w
https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aoefh5VPRYVVidJtx0q8_a7bCmLPUg
https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aoefh5VPRYVVidJp4-B5TQOas4d9ng
https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aoefh5VPRYVVidJlp7POk_uzAryWOw
[14:20] IceCold Skytower: https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aoefh5VPRYVVidQhKV01Dv_UNTmtig
https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aoefh5VPRYVVidQqVjNjZqn4-WV_Zw
https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aoefh5VPRYVVidQskmAom643DvjHIA
[14:20] IceCold Skytower: :P
[14:20] Kinda Vile: Because attrition is a thing and people want to move on in their career or settle down? I mean there's so many reasons why you'd might want to move on from LL.
[14:21] BJoyful: People come and go for any number of reasons ♥ I'd not panic as the Sky ahas been falling every day for almost 22 years and I'm not letting go
[14:21] Gray Mainlander: for mac peeps, LL has confirmed an internal apple silicon build that is on the future roadmap
[14:21] Sunni Mystiere: I wish many things for SL ... but that would take a ton of work.
[14:21] Sunni MystiereJade Mystiere (sunni.mystiere) listens and smiles
[14:21] Aglaia: they could start by simple things
[14:21] Alta Thiemen: Sculpties will kill SL! (But it's gonna take some time)
[14:21] Aglaia: like ordering llDialog buttons from top to bottom
[14:22] Kinda Vile: >mfw not all video games use PBR and look amazing regardless.
[14:22] Kinda Vile: >:3
[14:22] Valencia Skydancer: people are getting old
[14:22] Gray Mainlander: i wish them well , i just hope all it was is a change in jobs and not life throwing curve balls like it tends to do
[14:22] Kasabian ConstantineKasabian Constantine shakes his zimmer frame, who you callin old?!
[14:23] Kinda Vile: Can't believe I'll be 30 this year. ;n;
[14:23] Gray Mainlander: that would be a walker for americans lol
[14:23] Prettykitty Gumbo: I think the older I get the more free I feel.
[14:23] IceCold Skytower: im 36 :P
[14:23] Janus Afarensis: I can't believe Conrad will be 37 next year.
[14:23] IceCold Skytower: but yea all the people who actually know how SL works under the hood leaving
[14:23] Janus Afarensis᾿ (janus.afarensis) is 37 now. =p
[14:23] IceCold Skytower: will be a challenge for new additions to learn
[14:24] SarahKB7 Koskinen: Philip left once... in 2010
[14:24] Prettykitty Gumbo: They will be back. A lot of people come back. They miss it.
[14:24] Alta Thiemen: Fibs! *Nobdy* knows how SL works under the hood!
[14:24] Kinda Vile: One guy leaving doesn't equate to there being a mass exodus of devs leaving tho...???
[14:24] IceCold Skytower: quite a few devs left lately
[14:24] IceCold Skytower: not just one
[14:24] SarahKB7 Koskinen: Andrew left too, and he's back
[14:24] Prettykitty Gumbo: The sky is not falling.
[14:24] Alta Thiemen: SL will have to have proper weather before the sky can fall anyway
[14:24] Gray Mainlander: runitai's departure was kind of surprising, he was the pbr guy
[14:25] Medea Destiny: The sky is falling! It has been ever since I joined SL.
[14:25] IceCold Skytower: i already added my weather to my place no rain yet xD rain is acutally hard
[14:25] IceCold Skytower: i use PBR sky
[14:25] IceCold Skytower: and insane scripting lol
[14:25] IceCold Skytower: i got most of the rain figured out except for the actual rain drop effects
[14:25] Aglaia: PBR is nice but considering that it requires more efforts than usual to learn how to take profit of it, i don't know if it was a good idea
[14:26] Kinda Vile: I think PBR is a pretty good idea. But it doesn't instantly equate to good content.
[14:26] Kinda Vile: You don't just slap
[14:26] Kinda Vile: PBR on something and suddenly it's better.
[14:26] Valencia Skydancer: tech jobs are usually contract and temp, to work on a project.
[14:26] Gray Mainlander: they can only control whats in the viewer, they can't control shitty content creators, of which there are untold numbers lol
[14:26] Medea Destiny: eh PBR is easy, there are so many tools for generating PBR materials.
[14:26] BJoyful: Remember The Zimmers covering My Generation? I knew I guy named Peter in that video!
[14:26] Sunni Mystiere: Yes, Can be Valencia
[14:26] Alta Thiemen: PBR takes some learning, but I think it will be worth it
[14:26] Valencia Skydancer: long term employment is rare
[14:27] Aglaia: if Linden had made a better communication about how to take profit of PBR (like what environments settings to use and/or how to creat them and why reflection probes are important and how to use them), that would have helped
[14:27] Sunni Mystiere: With SL is was somewhat common to stay around for a while.
[14:27] Kinda Vile: It's like the same kind of people who think that they make a large project using LSL and suddenly they're the best around, but in reality their code wouldn't be up to snuff in a professional environment.
[14:27] IceCold Skytower: should see Lost Empire estate with its 3 regions, Fractal region, and Riddings, Astylus, and their neighbouring sims for good PBR content ideas
[14:27] SarahKB7 Koskinen: But how many people here have had the same job for 20+ years?
[14:27] Prokofy Neva: Wasn't Vir let go as the same time as Tommy and others? so this isn't new news I don't think?
[14:28] Medea Destiny: Just the normal learning curve with something new. There's plenty of information around to explain PBR, reflection curves etc.
[14:28] Gray Mainlander: it was news to me, i don't hang on every bit of babble out of the lab
[14:28] Sunni Mystiere: I would say over the past 10 years, that is less common, Sarah :)
[14:28] Kinda Vile: I'd probably honestly say
[14:28] Kinda Vile: Solares does amazing work with PBR.
[14:28] Medea Destiny: We are missing vitally needed script functions for PBR though.
[14:28] Prokofy Neva: Agliai, why do you have to fiddle with all that nonsense to see a thing? If the point was to "be like gaming worlds," when you go play WoW or Fortnight, do you sit with a package of settings and probes and stuff and nonsense? OF COURSE NOT. It just works! you just see it! So sorry, no sale.
[14:28] Kinda Vile: Really shows what it is capable of.
[14:28] Aglaia: not saying PBR is bad. i find PBR amazing. i've changed my whole private place and my store to use PBR materials and setup a proper environment. But i'm saying that most people, including landscapers and builders, sadly don't care about PBR and don't understand that it requires to change their habits
[14:29] Kinda Vile: Well I don't think it's a requirement to swap all of your stuff to PBR.
[14:29] SarahKB7 Koskinen: I like Geenz Linden. Fairly new but very good.
[14:29] Kinda Vile: In fact there are certain applications where the standard materials (blinn-phong) may be better for efficiency reasons.
[14:29] Alta Thiemen: similar to when materials first arrived in SL. It took a while for them to catch on
[14:29] Medea Destiny: People will shift over to PBR, it just takes time.
[14:29] Aglaia: no but at least setting up reflection probes otherwise PBR is just needless, and even ugly
[14:29] Medea Destiny: Or mesh
[14:29] Prokofy Neva: but why must it be so brutal? says who? PBR is not all that. I have some nice things with PBR; some badly made things: I make some things myself with PBR; they all look to me like shiny teapots in the antique stores of Upstate New York in 1962. They are not all that.
[14:29] Kinda Vile: For example; if your content is inherently unrealistic, PBR might be less useful for you.
[14:30] Gray Mainlander: they dont necessarily have to take up pbr, but they do need to love fs's next release with the options in there for older machines, its the only way that webrtc is getting rolled pretty much
[14:30] Gorgeous Aurelia: @Prok - Vix Linden left awhile ago, along with Alexia. Vir Linden is recently. Their names are similar, so it's confusing...
[14:30] Medea Destiny: Prokofy, there's a ton of badly made mesh around, that doesn't mean that mesh is bad.
[14:30] Prokofy Neva: PBR is fine without reflection probes in fact. It all depends on what your aesthetic demands are, and for most of us, gotta break it to you my dude, they are not high. Our draw distances are at 64, gentlemen.
[14:30] Prokofy Neva: Yes it does Medea, if it is so easy to make it badly then here's a thought! don't inflict it on the world!
[14:30] SarahKB7 Koskinen: Is anyones mesh eyes blurring in PRB when you cam away then back again?
[14:30] Gray Mainlander: folks have had a year now knowing that vivox was likely going away, i say chop it off and be done...
[14:30] SarahKB7 Koskinen: PBR*
[14:30] Aglaia: PBR materials are horrible most of the time, without probes. cause they will reflect the blue sky even inside your house
[14:30] Gray Mainlander: just do it.
[14:30] Prokofy Neva: oh right you are, Sir Vix and Vir different, of course
[14:30] Medea Destiny: Everything's easy to make badly. Let's close down SL!
[14:30] Zada Bury: Yes, it ws, Sarah
[14:31] BJoyful: I like Wendi and Izzy and... well all the Lindens. I've not met one I didn't like (or at least respect)
[14:31] Prokofy Neva: Aglaia, they do not, unless you have fussed with windlight and not put bog standard "Midday (Legacy)"
[14:31] Kinda Vile: Yeah, LSL is a scripting language that actually encourages certain coding practices that are actually bad in a normal environment.
[14:31] Aglaia: they do
[14:31] SarahKB7 Koskinen: Wondering if its a texture memory problem
[14:31] Kinda Vile: So... Yeah you can do things poorly in SL easily
[14:31] Prokofy Neva: It's a GOOD life, BJoyful. Good thing there are not AnthonyFremont Lindens, what?
[14:32] Zada Bury: At least Firestorm is a mess with the cache management at the moment, Sarah
[14:32] Kinda Vile: When you make something in Java, for example. It's good practice to avoid putting complex code into your 'Main' method. Whereas in LSL, which shares structural similarities, using too many methods can eat up memory fast and lead you closer to stack heap collisions.
[14:32] Medea Destiny: Sarah, are you using release viewer, or a preview?
[14:33] SarahKB7 Koskinen: 7.1.12 Forever
[14:33] Kinda Vile: So sometimes it's just better to write the same things twice (which is bad practice).
[14:33] Gray Mainlander: beta
[14:33] Aglaia: well you can do shit in lsl as you can do shit in java or any other language
[14:33] Matheo Finchfield: hi
[14:33] Kinda Vile: I'm mostly talking about how LSL is compiled.
[14:34] Kinda Vile: And how you may want to write for efficiency reasons, vs readability (which is usually preferred in any other language).
[14:34] Medea Destiny: There's a change to texture loading that will present smaller textures at smaller sizes. It's currently too aggressive, and causing smaller attachments to display at a texture low enough to look blurry.
[14:34] Aglaia: i always prefer readibility unless i really need something performant, which is rare
[14:34] Medea Destiny: It *should* be working so that textures are scaled proportionately to screen area, so textures don't blur, but it's not.
[14:35] Gray Mainlander: there was also talk of disappearing things when teleporting the other day in preview group, its a persistent thing apparently , that beq has experienced a lot
[14:35] Kinda Vile: Ehh... Depends what your writing. If it's a rather small script, sure.
[14:35] Kinda Vile: But not everybody writes small scripts.
[14:35] BJoyful: OMG Yes, Prok! Too true!
[14:35] Gray Mainlander: beq is lead dev of the fs project for those who aren't nerds
[14:35] Aglaia: even more for big complex projects for sure. readibily before
[14:35] BJoyful: Beq is a coding genius, I think
[14:36] Alta Thiemen: Awww, where's the fun in that. Think of the adventure you can have when you return to a script six months later and have to re-decipher it
[14:36] Kinda Vile: I'd agree with you if it wasn't for the fact that when your scripting projects get large, you also have a higher risk of running into a stack heap collision. Which then means that you have to consider how much memory your using, and things like many methods /can/ get in the way of that.
[14:36] Kinda Vile: Luckily a lot of LSL is somewhat self-documenting. ^^
[14:37] Kinda Vile: Due to it being high-level.
[14:37] Medea Destiny: Compilation to Lua is reportedly producing far more efficient bytecode that compilation to Mono. That should ease the memory problems significantly
[14:37] Kinda Vile: I hope, but I am not holding my breath. LL has promised a lot of things in the past and haven't delivered to expectations at first, then it needs a lot of updates to get there.
[14:37] Aglaia: stack heap collision is per-script. can have a little project with only script that will run out of memory, or a big project with several scripts that won't reach the limit
[14:37] Snowlord: I think the biggest issue with pbr is inconsistency. before we had alm on or off. a simple switch. and now that it's always on it was said we'd all see the same thing, however with probes.. if you have them off, if your not inside one, or if they are not setup correctly.. it's all over the place. even if you get a great look at a shop or home with a pbr outfit, as soon as you walk or drive on the mainland you look horrible. if it just worked by default as Profoky mentioned with gaming environments it would be so much better.
[14:37] Kinda Vile: PBR is just another proof of that.
[14:38] Gray Mainlander: the fs beta now has hdr and emissive off toggle, that should give you something closer to non pbr..but not exact
[14:39] Medea Destiny: Lighting has been fundamentally inconsistent since Windlight was introduced.
[14:40] Prokofy Neva: Beq is a coding genius but she was willing to impose PBR on all FS users and deprecate previous viewers on a harsh timetable so yeah
[14:40] Aglaia: would say biggest "issue" with lsl is the lack of simple things like nested list or key/value lists
[14:40] Gray Mainlander: she had no choice in the matter
[14:40] Gray Mainlander: fs must maintain parity with LL
[14:40] Aglaia: and the 64k limit, too
[14:40] BJoyful: Any change will be slow when there are so many content creators, with their own customers to satisfy and goals to achieve and 46,698 users online with their own opinions and expectations Its chaos theory in real time
[14:41] Prokofy Neva: Snowlord, frankly mesh is like that. Some skyboxes hae horrid floor bounce; some don't; some disappear at 10 pages; some don't. Etc. etc. LOD, LI, vertices, huge variety of bad to good
[14:41] Gray Mainlander: the other viewers do what they want because they dont have the user numbers that fs does
[14:41] Medea Destiny: That'll be fixed with Lua too, Aglaia
[14:41] Aglaia: this 64k limit is counter productive because it will force you to split your script in several parts, which results in something that consumes actually more memory than if it was in a single script
[14:41] Gray Mainlander: fs has to maintain what LL does lockstep pretty much
[14:41] Snowlord: even if everyone is on a pbr viewer. you still have pref options to turn off probes on various levels so still very inconsistent.
[14:41] Prokofy Neva: Gray, then you rebel, when you own 90% of the concurrency. Hello! that's what you do. the right thing.
[14:41] Aglaia: Medea i hope so... i mean i hope Lua will really become a thing
[14:41] Prokofy Neva: and frankly, that's what they ended up doing because LL itself put the brakes on their social Darwinism
[14:41] Prokofy Neva: because they saw they were losing customers, something FS never worries about
[14:42] Prokofy Neva: honestly you kids sit in the code cave all day and never talk to normal people
[14:42] Prokofy Neva: it's a national disgrace
[14:42] Gray Mainlander: yeah sure they can go rogue, and then what if LL says only our viewer can be used from now on
[14:42] Gray Mainlander: that would majorly suck
[14:42] SarahKB7 KoskinenSarahKB7 Koskinen remembers LuaLua fondly :)
[14:42] Prokofy Neva: Um, Oz Linden anyone? Who forced 2.0 on the population?
[14:42] Prokofy Neva: and FS saved search back then. Remember?
[14:42] Kinda Vile: Nested lists?
[14:42] Prokofy Neva: we have an economy today thanks to Cinders at FS then who saved search in that form.
[14:42] Prokofy Neva: FS is not some sacred goddess we must worship
[14:43] Kinda Vile: Hmm, oh yeah I suppose.
[14:43] Aglaia: lists of lists
[14:43] Prokofy Neva: It has performed good deeds but it is fallible like all anonymous unaccountable avatars giving away free stuff in SL
[14:43] Gray Mainlander: its still a better experience than the shitty LL viewer, regardless
[14:43] Kinda Vile: I know what you mean, I'm just trying to think why one would need nested lists out side of OOP design.
[14:43] Gray Mainlander: but to each their own
[14:43] Prokofy Neva: And Gray Maindlander who are...who? When you are at home?
[14:43] Prokofy Neva: Awfully blank profile
[14:44] Gray Mainlander: sure because people who cram their profiles full of things are the only ones to be trusted here lol
[14:44] Gray Mainlander: dont worry about my profile or who i am
[14:44] Prokofy Neva: I really don't have the time to sit and stand up to you people because I have rentals to take care of but you truly should be ashamed of yourself, the crap you inflict on the public
[14:44] Prokofy Neva: shame
[14:44] Gray Mainlander: surely you have better things to do
[14:44] Kinda Vile: I think you can code around a nested list by parsing a string value within a list using a separator that has separated values.
[14:44] Prokofy Neva: yes Gray, that's right. That's the ticket. Because a gray profile with nothing and mud as their picture is so reilable and trustworthy, yes indeedy
[14:44] Kinda Vile: Having that natively in the viewer would be nice... But I've rarely needed to do anything like that.
[14:44] Aglaia: you can always work around everything. but it's better and easier when it's native
[14:45] Gray Mainlander: you are a weird person prokofy thats all i can say lol
[14:45] Prokofy Neva: Your behaviour is so noted Gray and others. You wonder why LL loses customers. Look into your own souls.
[14:45] Prokofy Neva: Bye bye
[14:45] Medea Destiny: "you people"? :D
[14:45] Kinda Vile: There is a point to be made that when something memory intensive is native, it's more encouraged than when it's not there.
[14:45] Kinda Vile: Thing RISC chips for example.
[14:45] Kinda Vile: Doing less incentivizes programmers to think outside of the box.
[14:46] Aglaia: then no need list at all if you go this way
[14:46] Aglaia: let's just use strings with separators

[14:46] Kinda Vile: That's a very 'all or nothing' statement. :/
[14:47] Aglaia: many people use json to compensage the lack of structures in lsl. would be much nicer to just have proper structures in lsl, which means key/value lists and the ability to have a list as an elelment of a list
[14:47] Kinda Vile: I mean if that were the case I'd also like the inclusion of arrays for reducing memory.
[14:47] BJoyful: I really like the SLViewer but I'm so indulged with my AO in the taskbar and planar texture alignment and chat opening in separate windows... I can't go back now
[14:48] Kinda Vile: It'd be better to have a list of arrays than having a list of lists and if possible to design that around it, it'd save a lot on already limited memory.
[14:48] Medea Destiny: I think you're being added to an upated 'Feted Inner Core' list Gray, watch out.
[14:48] Aglaia: what do you call arrays? "array" has different meanings in each language. in PHP an array is actually a key/value list (aka a "map" in some other languages) which can also contain some arrays as values (like would nested lists)
[14:50] Kinda Vile: Static and fixed size linear data structures.
[14:55] BJoyful: (makes notes ;-)
[14:57] SarahKB7 Koskinen: Third Party Viewer meeting (14th February):

And so on and so forth.

The group is open to join, look it up in the book.

AI Summary Record of Bellisserian Discussion Group 2 Nov 2024

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Here's a summary record of the chat of the first meeting of the Bellisserian Discussion Group on November 3, 2024, at the clubhouse location in Woods Hole. Everyone was encouraged to introduce themselves and join the group, but this summary has stripped out the names of speakers.

Add your comments and corrections below.

 

Participants in this Second Life discussion highlighted several areas of improvement and challenges facing the platform, along with ideas for enhancements:

Hover Height and Visual Adjustments: Many users mentioned ongoing issues with avatar hover height and visual glitches, suggesting improvements in the avatar experience would be welcomed.

Community Engagement and Group Support: There were frustrations around limited group notifications and difficulties in hosting events, especially when some areas (e.g., Bellisseria) were restricted from events pages. Increasing communication tools or event options could foster community interaction.

New User Experience and Welcome Areas: The current new user orientation was critiqued for being ineffective compared to the older Orientation Island model. Participants suggested a single, engaging entry point could help retain new users by simplifying the introduction process.

Technical Enhancements:

PBR (Physically Based Rendering): While some see potential in PBR for reducing lag and modernizing visuals, others find it detracts from SL’s original charm, contributing to performance issues.

Mobile Viewer Limitations: Users reported that the mobile app runs poorly, heats up devices, and lacks functionality. Better optimization and expanded features for mobile would improve accessibility.

Vulkan Graphics Support: To reduce lag and improve graphics performance, some advocated for transitioning from OpenGL to Vulkan.
Content Creation and Platform Constraints:

Mesh vs. Prims and Sculpties: The emphasis on mesh has led to a divide between top designers and others. Participants expressed nostalgia for sculpties and prim builds, which allowed more flexibility and creativity in-world.

New Avatar Bodies (e.g., Senra): There was dissatisfaction with Linden Lab’s default avatar bodies. Users proposed offering better starter avatars or simplifying support for third-party bodies to improve customizability.

High Complexity Assets: Concerns were raised over the heavy load of high-prim, highly detailed items like animesh and PBR textures, which strain performance. Slimming down such assets or promoting lighter alternatives could ease these issues.

Marketplace and Abuse Reporting:

Copybotters on Marketplace: Several participants voiced frustration over copybotters and lack of enforcement against intellectual property theft on Marketplace.

Ineffective Abuse Reporting (AR): Many participants felt AR lacks transparency and results, with suggestions to reinstate a “police blotter” system or provide clearer feedback.
Business Model and Financial Viability:

Profitability vs. User Satisfaction: Some users questioned LL's financial motivations, especially following layoffs, while others believed LL’s continued emphasis on user retention could improve service. However, there was skepticism regarding the shift to Premium and Premium Plus options and associated costs.
Third-Party Platforms and Tools:

Primfeed: Users discussed Primfeed, a new SL-specific platform combining social features with image sharing. Although it has potential, opinions were mixed on its value versus platforms like Flickr.

External Moderation and New Innovations: Attendees felt there was resistance to change within the SL community, with some wanting more modernized code to attract developers, while others preferred SL’s unique, established identity.

Overall, the participants emphasized that while SL has grown, the platform needs a more cohesive strategy, focused on accessible technical upgrades, user-driven community engagement tools, improved moderation, and a more welcoming environment for new users.

The main complaints and suggestions for improvement discussed are as follows:

Complaints:

Sim Crashes and Griefing: Frequent sim crashes, often suspected to be caused by intentional griefing attacks, are driving users away. These crashes are seen as a vulnerability in Second Life's infrastructure, particularly affecting high-traffic or themed sims. Users reported limited success in resolving these issues through support tickets.

Support and Moderation Issues: Abuse reporting (AR) processes are seen as ineffective, with a lack of transparency and little apparent action taken against griefers. This leaves users frustrated and feeling unprotected, especially when they invest significant time and money in sim rentals.

Outdated Technical Infrastructure: The platform's reliance on outdated OpenGL technology, as opposed to more modern rendering like Vulkan, contributes to performance issues, including lag and poor stability. Many users feel SL’s technical setup struggles to meet modern standards.

Content Standards and Platform Limitations: Some users expressed frustration over the predominance of explicit content, especially on platforms like Primfeed. They also cited limitations due to the current avatar and body options, with the default Senra body criticized for being outdated.

Financial Constraints and Accessibility: High costs associated with maintaining a presence in SL, especially considering Premium and Premium Plus subscription fees, are a barrier for new users and discourage long-term investments in the platform.

Suggestions for Improvement:

Enhanced Sim Security and Crash Prevention: Users suggested engaging security experts to improve sim stability and guard against potential griefing. They also proposed that Linden Lab focus more on protecting sims from malicious actors by enhancing its technical defenses and implementing better support and reporting processes.

Improved User Support and Transparency: Bringing back features like the “police blotter” for abuse reports could help improve transparency and user trust in the platform’s moderation efforts. Ensuring more responsive support for griefing issues was also seen as essential to retaining users.

Technical Upgrades: Upgrading SL’s graphics engine to Vulkan was suggested to reduce lag and improve overall user experience. Additionally, simplifying the platform for new users—by reducing barriers to entry and improving ease of use—would help make it more accessible.

Modernize Content Creation Standards: Offering a well-supported, modern avatar that meets users' expectations for customization and compatibility would alleviate some complaints about the default body options. Improved tools for content creation and more streamlined workflows would encourage creators to continue innovating on the platform.

Flexible and Affordable Pricing Models: Lowering costs or offering more flexible pricing for land and subscription tiers would make Second Life more accessible, particularly for international users or those in lower-income areas, which could ultimately boost user retention.

Event-Specific Group Features and Community Tools: Allowing more ways for users to host events in a variety of sims without the constraints found in certain areas (like Bellisseria) could foster community engagement.

How to RESET Your PIN on Messenger and Stop the Annoying Madness Over Imposed Encryption

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualator

Are you PLAGUED MERCILESSLY by constant annoying messages to put in your PIN for Messenger because of these new end-to-end encrypted chats you didn't ask for?

Are you frustrated and baffled as to WHERE you can RESET YOUR PIN? Here is the pathway:

1. You can't do this on your desktop on Facebook OR Messenger! That's the secret! Some help pages take you to resetting the PIN on "Facebook Payments" but that's useless for *Messenger* -- it's only 4 digits and the Messenger required pin is 6, that's how you know it's the wrong one.

 

2 Go on your PHONE, either Android or iPhone. Then:

 

3. Go inside Messenger app and find SETTINGS, on the Android it is the gearshaft in the upper right-hand corner.

 

4. Scroll down to Privacy & Safety

 

5. Next, go to End-to-end Encrypted Chats

 

6. Now, counterintuitively because it doesn't seem like a thing to reset a PIN at, click Message Storage.

 

7. In Message Storage, voila, you will see RESET PIN in the middle of the screen on the Android (likely similar on iPhone).

 

8. Pick a 6-digit PIN that you will remember because otherwise you will constantly be resetting a one-time pin or finding your way back here *every time you use Messenger, encryption is imposed on you.*

 

9. Let Google Drive save the key. I hope that saves it in Google's Managed Passwords, not sure, on Chrome. But in any way your PIN is now permanently reset, remember it, and type it into Messenger to stop the madness!

 

John Jainschigg's Excellent Short History of Internet Business

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Illustrations via MidJourney

So this excellent thread by my long-time Twitter and SL friend John Jainschigg cloud engineer, software developer, content/product marketer, began a few tweets back with an anxious discussion, as one often finds these days, about "what to do when the robots take over." Dusty Greene asked:

If you weren't already wealthy, just a total usa normie non techie person ... how would you prepare for the near term Ai future ?

What would your strategy be ?

— Dusty Greene (@RustyRoad) December 6, 2023

A catastrophe makes me think like a Russian.

Russians would tell you to start hoarding salt and matches starting yesterday. Toilet paper and sugar at this point would be luxuries. You can make tea out of almost anything in the forest, and find some mushrooms.

— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023

You think you gotta start prepping that hard....

— Dusty Greene (@RustyRoad) December 8, 2023

So I go by the policy that @jjainschigg has suggested. AI is going to know who helped it, and who didn't help it. You won't be able to be neutral and hide out; it will know. So either help it, or go all in as a partisan and don't help it, mindful of the consequences. I help it.

— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023

So now we come to John's History of Everything on the Internet, in a thread unroll.

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree Well, I can't take credit for this idea -- it's a variation on what's called 'Roko's Basilisk,' which is itself a kind of retrocausal thought-experiment in how 'future AGI' makes itself inevitable (by this idea scaring everyone into being an accelerator) ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... and I guess, given the OP here, it's also a variation on the game theory idea of a 'Moloch Trap.'

Talking non-fantasy for a moment, my approach is pragmatic. I've been through several catastrophic industry crashes caused by technology ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... -- for example, the dismantling of 90s-era peak b2b publishing by web and Google. In that era, before the internet worked really well (universal broadband) and before 'the point of search' and internet ad brokerage caught on, there were thousands of nich-y magazines ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... paying solid, upper-middle-class salaries to journalists and designers and print production people and ad salespeople and these magazines each had a voice and influence and could defend a territory with moats of expertise, and advocated for readers and advertisers ... 

Yes my brother's life was ruined by these developments. He had a degree in engineering from RIT, as did his wife, they worked for big companies for years, they had their own company doing web publishing and he did network engineering as well and then many things fell apart.

— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... And between 1997, when the magazine/web group I helped operate was sold to CMP and United Business Media for a sum that made its founders very happy, and roughly 2003 when the entire business became unsustainable, was an arc of about six years. ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... And going through that, and a subsequent decade of watching what remained of traditional publishing bounce along the bottom and watching web replace print, and watching generations of journalists ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... adapt to a series of 'innovations' aimed at pulling the point of monetization back to the publishing side ('publishing company of one!' 'pivot to video!' 'podcasting!' etc.) was pretty agonizing. Because in the end, as we all now know ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... there is no 'diverse economy of opportunity' when there are vast disparities of scale. Infinitely-capitalized technical monopolies gotta monopoly. And what's left behind for humans is increasingly undignified and unsustainable for most. SURE, we now have ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... a handful of 25-year-old YouTube multimillionaire influencers. But that doesn't compensate for the loss of an entire metier that used to let at least hundreds of thousands of skilled people live dignified lives of material prosperity (not to suggest that ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... traditional publishing didn't have problems, but a smart kid could hope to actually work in the field and learn to love writing about helicopters or supermarket in-store point-of-sale (or a thousand thousand other things). ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... 'Kayso, I, personally, climbed the value-chain out of this hole. I was typically 'last fired' for a while (which meant I got to fire all my friends and dismantle wonderful staffs nurtured over a decade, etc.). And then I leveraged engineering skills and became ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... a web 'engagement infrastructure' entrepreneur (built metrics systems, ad-insertion systems, rode the Google beast for a while), and then an 'other kinds of engagement' entrepreneur (which is where I met Prokofy, in Second Life) ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... And then I became a cloud engineer when cloud took off. And I've done great. So, okay, arguably, it was possible (and I'm an example) of productive self-retooling past scale-driven technology inflection points. But the emotional cost was enormous. ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... the cost to my values (time able to spend with family, ability to build a professional legacy, etc., etc.) was significant. And (like everyone else) I now live in the World Of Precarity -- where the old model of 'Be good at something. Get a job. Do well. Show up. ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... Hire good folks. Train them. Give them career paths. Grow the business, etc. And stay with that thing as it grows for 15+ years before you get lured away to do the same kind of thing but with more scope and more lavish compensation' has been replaced by ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... 'You have skills they need for the next five minutes. Twist their arms as hard as you can for TC. Then prepare to jump in 18 months as soon as you smell flop-sweat because they are not your friends and will scrag you the second they hit a speed bump ...' ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... 'Kayso, as someone who's watched this happen from inside targeted organizations filled with smart, innovative people, let me tell you: it sucks. And the AI revolution is worse than any preceding revolution, because we're not talking about ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... something where you can tool up with new skills and learn to 'bring buyers and sellers together, but in a new way.' We're talking about an apparatus that commodifies brainwork for basically everyone ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... So my political strategy is to fight this as hard as I possibly can, and advocate for implementing every kind of regulatory, confiscatory tax, and other hurdle to slow large-scale de-jobification and build moats around metiers. And then more personally ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... (because I realize the above is futile) to climb the new value-chain, keep mastering the tech as it evolves, understand and map how companies inevitably get drawn into de-jobifying eddies and whirlpools ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... so I have an idea of 'who's getting the axe first and how, exactly, is that going to look?' (and believe me, it will mostly NOT look like 'We hired a robot to do your job. See ya.' -- but the effect will be broadly the same. First the hiring freezes. Then the reduction ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... in use of consultants and outsourcers, etc., etc. etc. All while selling people on the idea that their individual productivity will be increased by using the tools (yay!). Then a gradual turning-of-screws as those AI-enhanced productivity levels become normalized ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree ... and suddenly, Jane Doe will be a 'corporate marketing department of one!' with her robot assistants. And Jane's job, which used to be creative, will now be about metrics and testing and reporting up to the capital owners ... 

@Prokofy @RustyRoad @Liv_Boeree So, I guess, TL;DR -- my reluctant but enthusiastically-pursued strategy is 'sauve qui peut, suckers.' 

• • •

I then replied:

 

Yes my brother's life was ruined by these developments. He had a degree in engineering from RIT, as did his wife, they worked for big companies for years, they had their own company doing web publishing and he did network engineering as well and then many things fell apart.

— ✨magic✨ (@Prokofy) December 8, 2023

What is the Tekkie Wiki? And Why is it In this Handbasket?

The archived forums have some really great stuff in them and I hope the Lindens don't delete it -- but we can't trust them, after all, they closed the five most important, cutting-edge forums which contained the most relevant debate and discussion (albeit rancorous) about the very formation of the world and the metaverse itself. I know I wrote long posts there because I wanted to make sure it all got recorded for posterity for the growing ranks of analysts and future residents to study. I wish someone could make some powerful, automatic system that would download and save all those forums and make them into a searchable database that is housed in some publicly-accessible space away from the Lindens' censorious hands.

blaze Spinnaker's thread, SL must move beyond the Techi Wiki culture is a classic, a greatest hit, that takes further my original concept of the "tekkie-wiki". In it, I give my own definition of what I originally coined as the "tekkie-wiki" and I critique the closed, arrogant nature of the hothouse wickiup that deceitfully disguises its closed nature by ostensibly remaining "open to anyone to come up and put a sticky". And the usual parade of early adapters from Cubey Terra to Teeny Leviathan to Cienna Rand on down all weigh in to prove that a) SL doesn't at all suffer from the problem of being hobbled by a technical elite (!) and b) this technical elite in fact made all sorts of cool stuff like shiny bling and even Tringo so the masses should appreciate them.

To which I add that it's a lot like justifying the billions spent on the space program, when you end up with people even dead and just a lot of pictures of rocks and some Tang lol.

Of course, the space program is justifiable for many reasons of science beyond rocks but just like outer space exploration needed to pay its freight, either through government or private funding, so inner space exploration in virtual worlds, which is going to turn out to cost a lot, too, needs to find where it will pay its freight -- and not only on the backs of prosumers and pay-to-play addicted and the "crowd-serfed" who were "crowd-sourced" into working in Philip Rosedale's giant wiki in the sky.

User-content, and users monetarizing their time on line and generating content is all going to be important to *offset* costs and empower people but it can't *cover* the enormous costs of the making of the Metaverse. People would like to think the Metaverse will sort of make itself, or at least let 2 percent of its users who are skilled programmers make enough of it to get started, and then make a bundle off the rest of us getting licensed, or even free access to use the space. I don't think this is going to happen quite as they imagine.

This tekkie-wiki thread is an amazing catalogue of all the worst, most hobbling, self-referential and self-justifying technical thinking you can see -- backed up, of course, by some of the smug burghers of Second Life who may not necessarily themselves be so technically-minded, but who gain their economic advantages from programming, scripts, design, etc. in one way or another. They completely reject the notion that they run things or have an inside track or are privileged; they completely reject the notion that they are in the way of progress; they completely reject the notion that they are "evolved into a niche" (as Raph put it about games, and which I am enlarging as a concept I believe will go beyond MMORPGs into many other forms of not only worlds, but a lot of network technology).

It would be great of people could read this long, 26-page, 378-entry thread (!), but they're unlikely to, especially given that you have to wade through the usual ration of shit from FIC fanboyz and naysayers against any form of valid criticism of the way this world is being made.

But---it's important to think about it, as yet again, this game with the 11,000 online users and 300,000 logged in during the last 60 days are experiencing even more outages, crashes, down times, patches, and mess-ups.

I was reminded about this thread by thinking of Andrew "Throttle" Linden and looking up his famous contribution about the need to throttle membership if it grows too fast to enable himself and his fellow programmers to "get it right," and -- I might add -- to enable the class of the tekkie-wiktatorship to install itself and its content-creation machine more firmly.

I could add that the SL History Wiki is once again not only showing that history is written by the victors, but showing that history written by just a couple tekkie-wikis can get pretty tendentious by their coverage of the Andrew Linden "throttle" story, in which they leave out a lot of the debate of this very thread on the forums which blaze started and I also moved along -- to which Andrew felt compelled to respond in April 2005 as follows:

"It was always the intention to start SL small and let it grow. SL 1.0 was not launched ready for 1 million residents, and it is still not ready for that many. SL is growing at a very healthy rate. In fact, LL's main challenge is to develop the platform fast enough that SL's architecture can handle the next season's population. At the moment don't see many reasons to speed up the growth rate -- if SL were to "tip" and suddenly become the next big thing such that hoards of people were joining up, then LL would be forced to throttle new accounts until SL's fundamental system was more ready."

Earlier in this response, Andrew furiously denies that the Lindens ever sit around and talk about the tekkie-wiki problem, and maybe they don't.

But of course everybody else does. The tekkie-wiki problem -- only by another name -- is at the heart of the discussion of the future of the Metaverse organized at the Austin Games Conference; it is at the heart of discussions of the demise of a famous game blogger (who I didn't know of because I'm not much of a gamer); it's at the heart of a lot of what Raph Koster writes about his theory of dinosaurs (although he might not concede that). It's in the Zefranks "ugly myspaces" video of course, which is one of the most fun metaversal videos you can watch on the Internet these days -- thanks to SNOOPYB for pointing it out.

The point of all these discussions is that games and worlds are going to be made and controlled by the people living in them, not merely by the game-gods who create their larger architecture, and that is going to have to mean a form of power-sharing that the technorati -- who Foolish Frost rightly calls a "modern Masonic guild" aren't ready for, are going to resist mightily and bloodily, and will ultimately be eroded and overthrown by. It's one of the most important revolution of our times, the overtaking of the Information Age by the Consumer Age, where consumer rights to download, use, reformat, re-make, re-fashion--and yes, copy -- are going to grow by leaps and bounds and completely overturn the old medieval guild-age models of craftsmanship and art.

Raph Koster's dinosaurs aren't going to be just game companies like Blizzard who made World of Warcraft; they will even be enlightened game gods like Raph Koster himself who will remain as icons, but icons of the past, as more and more people learn how to do what he holds as a secret masonic knowledge now -- and do it even easier and better -- although, still unlikely to completely replace these dinosaurs completely, so that some giant pterodactyls will have to be kept around.

If you're going to create games or virtual worlds with technical tools in them to enable people to have the thrill of creation themselves, they have to operate at at least 2 levels -- 1) the "professional" level for professionally-trained or amateur-but-self-trained programs and artists to function -- and 2) not too complicated and frustrating so that a small but steady stream of casual users can at least knock together stuff on a Sunday afternoon, say, if they need a dock on their lakefront house, or more importantly in terms of innovation in the world, that some of them can cross over from casual to amateur to professional.

Of course, making these tools work well enough to keep professionals captured but not making them so clunky and counter-intuitive that normal people can't access them is the heart of the new media maker's challenge. They don't have a lot of incentive to face it, because it will be their undoing. Consumers need to incentivize the dinosaurs to keep becoming more free as much as the dinosaurs need to keep opening up and incentivizing consumer-creators.

In the AGC discussion, the Multiverse guy, Corey Bridges, evidently differs from the more democratic and long-tail advocate Raph Koster by saying that he thinks the future isn't "user-content" but "indies" -- that is, not amateurs but independent professionals, and that might include amateurs who don't have credentials. He believes that the platform he's making for world-construction, "serious teams are going to be enabled -- indie teams...not just consumers and pro-consumers." And he hastens to explain that "amateur doesn't mean incompetent, just means you don't have credentials, lingo, and contacts."

He also lets on that with his world-burner, we'll see "men in tights" but a "different kind of men in tights" with things like Arden, a Shakespearean world that Edward Castronova, the expert on synthetic worlds and their economies, is making.

Raph evidently thinks more and more users will be empowered to make their own stuff; but of course -- will it be good stuff? I think we need to ensure endless horizons to make bad and tasteless stuff -- ugly MySpaces -- to create the space needed for future innovation, simplification, and empowerment.

It's very hard for game gods to let people be free to be mediocre; they can't help sneering, and they can't help being worried how that doesn't help them sell their platform to more people, who want to see jet-skiing in front of fabulous condos, not clumsy lean-tos with a picture of somebody's RL dog on the wall.

One thing I've found in Second Life is that if you introduce people to their own space and tell them they can build anything they want, very few do -- still, a significant number will, enough to keep all three of my newbie communities, each of which holds about 20 people full most of the time. However, what some "build" is merely a prefab -- although in most cases, they want a prefab they can totally take apart and mod. The Archer house by Bill Stirling, for example, is perfect for that -- he's made it cost $1 and made it copyable and moddable, unlike a lot of clutchy content makers, so that newbies can make endless variations of the fences, walls, roof, etc., stacking it up, putting out half or double the house, etc. Rem Koolhaas's housing units fulfill the same function, but at a higher price.

In most cases, these consumer-creators with their suburban souls don't satisfy the liberal, often urban sophisticated (or provincial zealous) tekkie wiki soul, and don't build something like a fractal rotating Moebius strip with some representation of data floating around it -- because they want a house, and a comfortable house where they can really go inside, have good camera angles, feel protected and private (as best you can given that's an illusion in SL with camera zoom and fly-ins), and decorate the internal and external space.

Out of the hundreds of newbies I've subsidized by dollar-a-prim or even lower-cost newbie settlements, only some go on to greater glory as content creators and builders. Still, enough do to raise the question of whether the policy of subsidizing or incentivizing some "merited" portion of the amateur content creation class is justified for game companies.

The other thing that's clear, however, is that aging newbies and too-old oldbies constantly invade this experimental, subsidized space and try to suck it down and rip it off without any sort of return, or outright grief it by junking it up or putting graffiti in the groups or the areas. (On a larger scale, this is what happened to the Lindens' developers' awards, as the camp-chair kings drained it dry.) It's like the problem of inner-city projects, where the sameness and drabness of the physical plant seems to inspire people to piss in the hallways more and break the windows.

If you try to ameliorate the problem by putting out really nice prefabs and walkways and bushes or townhouses all in a row, people often rebel and drive you nuts with their incessant call to modify, change, replace, even erase what you carefully put out. But the minute you go back to putting out empty lots again, it seems a new wave of customers come up and get bewildered over the "too many choices" involved and go looking for the prefabbed experience again.

I think the balancing act required here between world-makers and consumer-creators can be illustrated with the "look" today of the norther atoll continent with the moth names, and the southern down-under continent with the brown-sugar sand and the Korean names -- and even the finishing off of the northwestern stoney shores on the eastern edge of the mainland.

In the atoll continent, the Lindens tried some new content stuff, back when they evidently envisioned getting rid of telehubs, putting in p2p, putting in new map capacity, and then having people explore the expanes of this area without telehubs.

So they didn't put in telehubs, forced people to fly huge distances to "explore" (such social engineering was heartily resented by most people and eventually they put in a few telehubs). They put in quaint cobble-stone roads; wooden walkways; a colourful temple based on a RL temple in Thailand; a great stone wall; even an airplane crash. Some of this was a bit hastily done; at least one virtual architect sneered at the Moth Temple as "like Tinker Toys" -- that's silly, as other architects recognize it is a great work of art and perfect not only as a virtual world historical site, but as a telehub, and now as a visitors' site -- that is, if we can develop it enough to attract visitors and advertise it.

Meanwhile, down under, the Lindens didn't put anything; no roads, no bridges, no builds of any kind, not even infohubs at first, and just some not-for-sale Linden land to break up the endless expanse of beach.

This was LL's answer to Anshe Chung, who bought islands, textured them with white sand, and sold bunches of them for a huge amount of money -- the Lindens felt they should do no worse. The Lindens' essential distaste for "the masses" and their disdain for "white pancake sand" was evident, however.  In the northern atoll they doctored the sand with something that was probably intended to be brown/green lichen but came out looking more like blue chemical waste; they did a little better with the brown-sugar stuff in the south but couldn't bring themselves to bleach it white for ideological reasons.

The toxic-spill approach to land development always seems to slip out of the Lindens when they go at something; they can't help but set up areas to be denuded and blighted all in the name of "freedom of creativity--land is your blank canvas"-- like their really dumb idea of backing up two water sims to each other, so that the waterfront of one sim, sold at a huge price on the auction, later because what I call waterback, facing the ugly houses and casinos plunked on the cheap water of the adjacent sim put in and sold for less later (a criminal action, really, to devalue their customers' early products sold for more, with their later products sold for less).

And down under, there's an amazing wasteland of blight -- it really staggers the mind. Spinning signs, goth castles smack up against black-box porno clubs, desperate little Japanese tea gardens dwarfted by giant modernist spinning cube crap -- you have to admire some of the hearty little stores like 1-800-Bettie's 1930s-1950s that have put down roots in a place like Kyung, and the moments of good taste even in stores that do crop up about every 65,000 meters. What a crime, not putting in Lindens roads or bridges or public areas or protected waterways to give at least some people a change of a protected view, but to also break up the expanse of consumer-creator blight. It was a crime committed in the haste to compete with Anshe and make a buck -- these sims sold for way over their opening auction bid of $1000. As for beating Anshe, I don't think they succeeded; she merely cornered the market and put out portals on every single overpriced piece of land taking the land-shopper to her islands, which are protected from the kind of blight the Lindens didn't bother to reduce with even the slimmest of interventions.

And that's always been my beef about them -- they claim to make it "our world, our imagination," yet they intervene constantly, with welcome area building contests, subsidized newbie rentals on 512s, the wilderness sims, the railroad station building conetst, etc. and then decisions like foregoing roads which themselves are a kind of intervention by non-intervention.

But when they are needed to intervene *just a little* by making a sketch, giving just a general idea -- putting down a road, perhaps sparking imagination with a bit of a ruined wall or a windmill on a tiny commons parcel -- they shirk this obligation of world-builders as somehow being "not scalable" or being what residents are supposed to do. As a result, residents are forced into close and angry proxmity with each other with absolutely no rules -- a simple idea like selling sims as "residential" or "entertainment" (by having more CPU to sustain clubs) to keep the black boxes from lagging out the homes everywhere -- seems beyond the disdainful Lindens, who constantly tell us "it can't scale" and it would harm the almight and sacred "freedom to do what the fuck I want on my land".

Ultimately, the Lindens are likely to give up on their mainland experiment, just as on my tinier scale, where I mimic the Lindens in order to understand what they are doing, I'll be forced to give up my subsidized newbie areas. People want user content. They want game-god content. They want user content AND game-god content. They can't make up their minds. They can't be satisfied.

What the Lindens are selling and what Raph Koster might sell is the pride of creation, a pride that anybody from a humble cube-rezzer and texturer out of the library to a sophisticated island developer can experience. They have to keep the worlds open at both ends for both kinds of consumer-creators, and all in between to experience that amazing thrill. Keeping them open doesn't mean criminal laissez-faire attitudes of licentiousness and fuck-you hedonism that elevates the "do what the fuck I want" mentality of a club on a 2048 m2 to paralyze and devalue the purchase of every other person on the sim, most of whom have even larger parcels than that dumb-ass club with its camp-chair-false-traffic avatar weight and strobe lights.

 

Comments

Oh...you're back.

Posted by: Squeedoo S. | September 14, 2006 at 02:22 PM

i wonder what the work did to you to make you become like this

Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | September 14, 2006 at 04:27 PM

Another excellent entry. "Desperate little tea houses" - so apt.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut | September 14, 2006 at 04:56 PM

Great entry, Prokofy. Thanks for the mention. I should clarify what I said at AGC: I think the future is not *just* user-generated content, but also the wider phenomenon of indie-generated content. (So I include users under the umbrella of indies.) What I was (perhaps clumsily) trying to do in the "Future of Virtual Worlds" panel, was get a fuller term than "user-generated content." I feel that doesn't accurately reflect the full range of creators who are going to be enabled in the very near future. I think users, pro-sumers, independent professionals, and various other hyphenates now have, or are very soon going to have incredibly rich and powerful palettes to create their art.

FWIW, all of the Multiverse team members are huge believers in the long tail. (And specifically in how we're trying to enable it for virtual world creation.) I've scarcely shut up about it since Anderson wrote his first piece about it in Wired a couple years back.

Thanks again.

--Corey

Exec Producer, Multiverse

Posted by: Corey Bridges | September 14, 2006 at 08:23 PM

Hi, Corey, thanks for the comment and the clarification, and I see its a range, and a range from user to professional with "an incredibly rich pallette" -- but I do wonder if *your* long tail is a long tail of indies only (professionals in one way or another)or whether it includes even the amateur maker of ugly stuff.

Another point you made in your presentation, which I didn't mention because it went off into what feels like non-world/non-game areas (but apparently we're to think of it as all metaversal) was something like this: why just talk about "user content" (which you noted was even condescending about blogs and podcasts), when in fact you could just call it "content"--period.

Well, except quality does matter, and there's a difference between The New York Times, the Daily Kos, and my blog, so the question is: the Internet can sustain the New York Times, the Daily Kos, and my blog, but will virtual world owners/makers be willing to sustain the world equivalents in that range?

And I do wonder whether the "rich pallette" and easier-to-use or more capacious tools will product art, or produce quality. I'm not sure if a better hammer makes a better carpenter, maybe not, maybe it's misleading. Perhaps people who are at heart content producers but don't have this or that mechanical eye-hand coordination skill might be amped up just that further along the development ladder, but ultimately, if they suck in art, they suck.

I'm not so sure I believe in the long tail. That is, sure, there's a tail with all kinds of interesting stuff happening along it but it might look like the snake that swallowed the mouse in parts, that people just like to have content made for them, and they can't figure out enough how to make it or even consumer a variety of it from others, and they want the more programmed experience of a game like WoW.

While recognizing that professionals, hyphenated indies/prosumers/newly-capacitated amateurs, etc. all have their role to play, I hope to secure a space where the truly rank amateur who isn't ever going to be good is free to make his home his castle.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | September 14, 2006 at 08:51 PM

Who is Prokofy Neva? And Why is he In this Handbasket?

Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | September 15, 2006 at 08:20 PM

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Kyrah+Abbatoir&word2=Prokofy+Neva

http://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html

Irk A Baby Tar Ho

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | September 15, 2006 at 10:16 PM

> Who is Prokofy Neva?

> Irk A Baby Tar Ho

"AIR ARK AT HOBBY"

Posted by: Timeless Prototype | September 16, 2006 at 12:03 PM

"Prokofy Neva Antagonist of Second Life"

to

"An ovation of enragedly soft-spoken FIC"

or

"Foolproof geek, and nasty FIC innovates"

(thanks to Anagram Genius ;) )

Posted by: Yumi Murakami | September 16, 2006 at 01:34 PM

Cute that googlefight, but remember others can play that game as well.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Frans+Charming&word2=Prokofy+Neva

Posted by: Frans Charming | September 16, 2006 at 02:41 PM

Yep, you can have a lot of fun with it:

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Tekkie+Wiki&word2=Prokofy+Neva

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=FIC&word2=Prokofy+Neva

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=FIC&word2=Philip+Linden

and so on.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | September 16, 2006 at 03:11 PM

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Kyrah+Abattoir&word2=Prokofy+Neva
learn to copy paste prok

Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | September 16, 2006 at 08:13 PM

lol, pwn3d!

Posted by: Timeless Prototype | September 17, 2006 at 04:31 AM

It's great that Kyrah is able to exploit the appearance of the common word "abattoir," which means "slaughterhouse" to increase her hittage : )

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | September 17, 2006 at 01:27 PM

stop waving your dicks around

Posted by: Baba | September 18, 2006 at 05:25 AM